Phil Spector stared straight ahead. It was the appointed hour for the legendary music producer's six-year murder case to come to a close and the courtroom was packed with reporters, fans and detractors eager to hear his sentence. But he did not look at the judge, take notes or whisper to his lawyer.

For Spector, it seemed, it wasn't worth it. A life sentence is mandatory for second-degree murder and the only decision before the judge Friday was whether Spector, 69, should have his first parole hearing in 2027, 2028 or 2034.

After listening to arguments, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler chose 2028. As the judge told Spector that he would have to serve at least 19 years in prison -- at which time he would be 88 -- he remained stoic.

Spector declined an opportunity to address the court and moments later, surrounded by court officers, he shuffled out a side door.

It was a quiet end to a legal proceeding that has intrigued the public since Feb. 3, 2003, when actress Lana Clarkson was shot to death in the foyer of Spector's Alhambra mansion.

A jury convicted him of Clarkson's murder last month, a year and a half after another panel had deadlocked.

The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.

“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.”

Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”

As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind.

“If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”

Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif., said teenagers had a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.” For that reason, he said, the rapid rise in texting has potential for great benefit and great harm.

“Texting can be an enormous tool,” he said. “It offers companionship and the promise of connectedness. At the same time, texting can make a youngster feel frightened and overly exposed.”

I am more concerned about the fact that the world is going by, and these kids are too busy texting to notice and interact with it.

(OTOH, I often feel this way about adults who can't put the phone down, not just the kids.)